updated 10:55 am EDT, Tue May 17, 2011

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 and Tesla M2090 official

NVIDIA on Tuesday set out to lure more mid-range gamers and professionals by introducing both the regular, non-Ti version of the GeForce GTX 560 as well as a new Tesla card. The new card trips down just enough to drop the price down to $199 with 336 stream (visual effects) processors, 56 texture address units, and at least an 810MHz core clock speed, 1.62GHz effects shader clocks and 1GHz GDDR5 memory. While its core and texture unit counts are similar to the outgoing GTX 460, the newer design and higher clock speeds should make it noticeably faster.

The chipset is coming with a new set of beta drivers for Windows users designed to optimize the speed; modern games like Bulletstorm, Crysis 2, and Portal 2 get performance boosts between six to 15 percent. It now has a much wider range of profiles for 3D Vision-aware games, including Duke Nukem Forever, and the NVIDIA Update utility can now bring in new SLI profiles for those using two or more GeForce cards in tandem.

Boards using the GTX 560 should be available immediately from ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, and others, some of which will come factory-overclocked. Computer builders are also integrating the GTX 560 into systems, although NVIDIA didn't name any customers.

The new pro board, the Tesla M2090, is considered NVIDIA's new flagship and translates the technology from the GTX 580 to general-purpose computing. Its 512 cores and 6GB of memory give it as much as 665 gigaflops when handling double-precision math and have reportedly set a record. An M2090 running th biomolecule simulator AMBER 11 calculated 69 nanoseconds of activity in a single day versus the previous best of 46.

NVIDIA didn't give pricing for the board, which should support both NVIDIA's own CUDA as well as OpenCL and similar general-purpose computing standards. It should be available both stand-alone as well as in pre-assembled servers like the HP ProLiant SL390 G7 4U, which can fit as many as eight M2090s.